And then there is this…
Liz Cheney for President?
I have been having the thought, frequently and steadily, that a Liz Cheney run for President might be the best pathway to holding on to our Republic and the freedoms that we have enjoyed for so long.
The odds of her being nominated seem long to me. However, if she threw her hat in the ring, I think we might want to help her. And by we, I mean centrist independents and moderate Democrats.
I say this knowing that she holds policy positions that are antithetical to a lot of what I believe in. My calculation is this. At present, the political landscape looks poor for Democrats in 2022 and in 2024. The Biden administration currently has a very low approval rating and conditions don’t look good for improvement in the next two and a half years. We may be looking at a scenario where, even setting aside the state level voting shenanigans, it is going to be difficult for Democrats to win the presidency again. Hopefully this will improve, but it’s prudent to think about the what ifs.
So far, the front runner for the Republican nomination is 45. It’s possible that the 1/6 committee is making a dent in his support, but it remains strong, grounded in willful ignorance as it is. The other alternatives, so far, are Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot. I have no confidence that either of them would be the kind of reverent constitutionalist that Cheney is. We are talking about the survival of the republic here and Cheney is the only one I trust on the Republican side to insure that.
I am convinced that we cannot allow a MAGA Republican to win the presidency in 2024. I am pretty sure any such candidate will shred the constitution while in office. Certainly 45 would.
Add to this mix that 45 and his MAGA horde are gunning for a constitutional crisis should he (or DeSantis or Abbot) be nominated but loose.
Bottom line, a MAGA candidate either wins and then causes a constitutional crisis, or they loose and cause a constitutional crisis. Both scenarios are grim.
On the other hand, should Cheney find a way to capture the nomination, she can be counted on to uphold the constitution in victory or defeat. And, I would argue, if you really want to return the Republican party to an honorable and reasonable participant in our two party system, she needs to win. The non-MAGA Republicans will need that validation for her principled conservatism to be viable. She also needs time as leader of the party to clean out the worst of the MAGA rats.
If she were to be nominated, run and loose, we would avoid a constitutional crisis. However, a loss would allow the MAGA folk to continue to fester and the party could easily swing to the dark side again.
I have been conducting my own non-scientific survey of liberal friends and, interestingly, many of them are having the same thoughts I am. Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the major Democratic donors that are supporting Cheney in her fight to keep her house seat in 2022. We have all come to the same conclusion, Cheney is looking like a clear pathway out of the disaster we are heading for.
The question independents and liberals will need to ask themselves if she is the Republican nominee in 2024, who is best positioned to save the Republic? And if the answer is Liz Cheney, can we play the long game and overcome our aversion to her policies and vote for her? The choice to me is Cheney now and live to fight for a more liberal society another day. The alternative could seal off any possibility of the multicultural society we have been heading for, for a very long time.
Tha apple install time calculation must operate in a parallel universe moving near the speed of light…
About to embark on a clean install of the Monterey OS on my desktop computer. Backups made. Boot disc made. It’s go time.
First tomato to start turning ripe…
No end to the crazy…
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — an avid conspiracist herself — said the stones represented a plan for population control from the “hard left.” QAnon conspiracies have also swirled around the Guidestones.
Forget Abortion, Democrats Should be Messaging About Birth Control
For Democrats who are passionately pro-choice, here is a hard truth: You are not going to turn the scores of millions of voters who find the topic uncomfortable into militant pro-choice activists…
Take Away the President’s Immunity
You think?…
Various motivations may feed into Trump’s electoral calculation for 2024, but one in particular is coming into focus. In seeking office, he would be seeking legal immunity.
Pro-Choicer, Pro-Lifer Do Lunch
…among Americans 50 and older, women outnumber men among those who identify as pro-life. It’s hard to credit that all of those American women, most of whom came of age in a feminist, post-Roe era, are motivated by a desire to subjugate themselves.
Promising Signs from the NATO Summit
At last week’s NATO summit in Madrid, the alliance issued a formal Strategic Concept that is striking for its coherence and focus.
The Best Photobooks from Les Recontres d Arles, 2022
Dayanita Singh: “a book is a conversation with a stranger in the future.”
Does anyone here use Substack as a publishing platform? Pros? Cons?
Maybe not so wild thought. The way out of the US political mess is for Liz Cheney to run for and get elected president.
What Stood Out, Week 27
The overturning of Roe-v-Wade continues to have repercussions but got overshadowed by the testimony of Cassidy Hutchison. My titled post about anger and Roe-v-Wade speaks to my thoughts about the issue.
This post on Richard Powers by Maria Popova had a couple of zingers in it about humanity, it’s treatment of the environment, and need to regain a shared source of “external significance.” Where that source of external significance should come from is a question. Nature seems most reliable but it is also what we are steadily destroying:
But Powers himself was out of purchasing power. By the time he realized he was at the midpoint of his expected lifetime, he found himself gnawed by the same suspicion many of us face on our darkest days: that humanity had permanently maimed life on Earth, that “there was something inherently wrong with Homo sapiens, that we suffered from congenital defect — a built-in, incurable sadistic impulse toward domination that doomed us to failure along with 98% of Earth’s other experiments that had already gone extinct.”
Insanity wasn’t in our genes — we humans had gone off the rails because our culture had lost its source of external significance. We were so completely colonized by the belief that all meaning came down to economics and private consumption that it no longer even felt like a belief. We’d forgotten the fact that, in Gaylor Nelson’s great phrase, “the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and not the other way around.”
I don’t really know how we find that shared sense of external significance. Everything is relative. There are no absolutes. In a world where culture is built on appetites, nothing is sacred.
This post on the dust devils on Mars pulled me out to something bigger, broader:
Returning to politics, this quote from an article on the Biden administration in The Atlantic felt as if Alexa has been channeling my thoughts to the author:
Compounding those anxieties, Undem said, is “almost despair” among left-leaning voters that Democratic leaders seemingly have no plan for how to respond to this multi-pronged offensive. Jentleson likewise said that Biden has created an “enormous disconnect” and “feeling of powerlessness” among Democrats by failing to make a broader case against structural problems such as the Senate’s small-state bias or the skewing of the Supreme Court bench that the GOP may exploit for sustained minority rule.
I mean really, where is the plan to fight back?
And this article on the similarities between Prohibition and Abortion gave me some hope that the ship can right itself:
Prohibition and Dobbs were and are projects that seek to impose the values of a cohesive and well-organized cultural minority upon a diverse and less-organized cultural majority. Those projects can work for a time, but only for a time. In a country with a representative voting system—even a system as distorted in favor of the rural and conservative as the American system was in the 1920s and is again today—the cultural majority is bound to prevail sooner or later.
But does the author really believe that system of representative voting isn’t in danger of being permanently locked in by that cultural minority?
David French is new to my selection of reading streams. He is a devout Christian, veteran, and, I think, conservative in the sense that conservatives used to be, principled. He makes the point that it is difficult to indict former presidents, for good reason, but in the present case, necessary regardless of the difficulty:
The Case for Prosecuting Donald Trump Just Got Much Stronger
For law enforcement to indict a former president (and perhaps the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination) would set a grave and potentially dangerous precedent. But there is another precedent that is perhaps more grave and more dangerous—deciding that presidents are held to lower standards of criminal behavior than virtually any other American citizen.
This post from Heather Cox Richardson was perhaps the low point of my week:
Heather Cox Richardson, June 30, 2022
In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations…
This article in The Paris Review caught my attention big time. Over and over again, it is true, sex sells. I can’t help feeling that the woman in the article is getting the short end of the stick. The arrangement seems to be working, for now. I wonder what she might write about it in ten years.
But really, who am I kidding, I read it to fuel fantasies of the libidinous kind and it did a good job:
Catherine Opie, this woman’s photographic work makes me happier with my own:
And the event of the week:
Hutchinson’s testimony was a withering indictment of America’s 45th president. But it was also, if less directly, an indictment of his party, his supporters, his acolytes, those who went silent and those who spoke up on his behalf. He and they are ever twinned.
Here is an article about how fewer Americans believe in god. I haven’t believed in god, i don’t know, maybe ever. I think I tried when I was young, but it didn’t make sense. It wasn’t rational. I was surprised to find that 80% +/- still believe in god. I would have thought it to be lower.
America, Land of Unbelieving Believers
The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S.
The interesting part of the article is that Americans haven’t stopped being spiritual, they are just being spiritual in more personal ways, loosely connected to faith traditions other than Christianity which have been personalized to their own needs. What we used to call New Age I suppose. Organized religion is loosing its luster.
This article was just plain frightening:
The MAGA Grocery King of Southwest Florida
“If they try to steal the next election, the ’22 elections, I’m all in. We don’t want to talk about what that is…I have enough guns to put in every single employee’s hands. I hope it never gets there.”
I am deciding that I may read less news, as necessary as it is to keep an eye on what is happening, and more books. My book reading selection tends to be more uplifting, lofty, big picture, etc…
Closing remarks by Liz Cheney at her recent debate with those who seek to replace her in Wyoming.
Think what you will about her voting record, Liz Cheney is a hero. If we get past this moment in history without the loss of democracy, she and I will disagree about almost everything, but, “long may she run,” to quote Neil Young.
It’s been a tremendous honor—the highest honor of my professional life—to represent the people of Wyoming for the last five and a half years. I am a conservative Republican. I’m going to work hard to earn the vote of every Wyomingite in this election. And I think it’s important for people to know that I believe that the most conservative of conservative principles is fidelity to our Constitution.
In Wyoming, we ride for the brand, and our brand is the United States Constitution. So, I’m going to ask people for their vote. I’m going to work hard to earn that vote.
But people need to know something about me. I will never put party above my duty to the country. I will never put party above my duty to the Constitution. I swore an oath under God and I will abide by that oath. I won’t say something that I know is wrong simply to earn the votes of people to earn political support.
That’s what the voters of Wyoming deserve. That’s what the voters of Wyoming demand. That’s the kind of respect that we owe the voters of this great state.
We need to recognize that if we are not faithful to the Constitution, if we embrace lies, if we embrace the lies of Donald Trump, if we tell the people of Wyoming something is not true, we will soon find ourselves without the structure and the basis and the framework of our Constitutional Republic.
If we don’t abide by the Constitution when it is politically inconvenient, then we will not have the Constitution as our shield when we need to defend our First Amendment rights and our Second Amendment rights.
So, I’m asking for your vote and I’m asking you to understand that I will never violate my oath of office, and if you’re looking for somebody who will, then you need to vote for somebody else on this stage because I won’t.
I will always put my oath first."
July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
We grilled tonight…
Liz Cheney to Run Against Trump?
As the hearings of the January 6 committee get closer… to implicating Donald Trump criminally in the violent attack on the US Capitol, the former president is reportedly considering announcing a 2024 presidential bid earlier than he might have.
The MAGA Grocery King of Southwest Florida
“If they try to steal the next election, the ’22 elections, I’m all in. We don’t want to talk about what that is…I have enough guns to put in every single employee’s hands. I hope it never gets there.”
Dust devils on Mars… a collection of photographs and a video of the phenomenon.